I learned today that there is an exhibit about my father in the famous creation museum near Cincinnati. This museum is a multi-million dollar project set up by creationists as a pro-bible “natural history” museum that shows dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and how the flood carved the Grand Canyon and much more. It’s all completely bullocks and a number of satirical articles about it have been written, including the account by SF writer John Scalzi.

While almost all this museum is about desperate attempts to make the creation story sound like natural history, it also has the “Biblical Authority Room.” This room features my father, Charles Templeton in two sections. It begins with this display on bible enemies which tells the story of how he went to Princeton seminary and lost his faith. (Warning: Too much education will kill your religion.)

However, around the corner is an amazing giant alcove. It shows a large mural of photos and news stories about my father as a preacher and later. On the next wall is an image of a man (clearly meant to be him though the museum denied it) digging a grave with the tombstone “God is Dead.” There are various other tombstones around for “Truth,” “God’s Word” and “Genesis.” There is also another image of the mural showing it a bit more fully.

Next to the painting is a small brick alcove which for the life of me looks like a shrine.

In it is a copy of his book Farewell to God along with a metal plaque with a quote from the book about how reality is inconsistent with the creation story. (You can click on the photo, courtesy Andrew Arensburger, to see a larger size and read the inscription.)

I had heard about this museum for some time, and even contemplated visiting it the next time I was in the area, though part of me doesn’t want to give them $25. However now I have to go. But I remain perplexed that he gets such a large exibit, along with the likes of Darwin, Scopes and Luther. Today, after all, only older people know of his religious career, though at his peak he was one of the most well known figures of the field. He and his best friend, Billy Graham, were taking the evangelism world by storm, and until he pulled out, many people would have bet that he, rather than Graham, would become the great star. You can read his memoir here online.

But again, this is all long ago, and a career long left behind. But there may be an explanation, based on what he told me when he was alive.

Among many fundamentalists, there is a doctrine of “Once Saved, Always Saved.” What this means is that once Jesus has entered you and become your personal saviour, he would never, ever desert you. It is impossible for somebody who was saved to fall. This makes apostacy a dreadful sin for it creates a giant contradiction. For many, the only way to reconcile this is to decide that he never was truly saved after all. That it was all fake. Only somebody who never really believed could fall.

Except that’s not the case here. He had the classic “religious experience” conversion, as detailed in his memoir. He was fully taken up with it. And more to the point, unlike most, when much later he truly came to have doubts, he debated them openly with his friends, like Graham. And finally decided that he couldn’t preach any more after decades of doing so, giving up fame and a successful career with no new prospects. He couldn’t do it because he could not feel honest preaching to people when he had become less sure himself. Not the act of somebody who was faking it all along.

However, this exhibit in the museum doesn’t try to paint it that way. Rather, it seems to be a warning that too much education by godless scientists can hurt your faith.

So there may be a second explanation. As a big-time preacher, with revival meetings filling sporting arenas, my father converted a lot of people to Christianity. He was one of the founders of Youth for Christ International, which is today still a major religious organization. I meet these converts from time to time. I can see how, if you came to your conversion through him, my father’s renunciation of it must be very hurtful — especially when combined with the once-saved-always-saved doctrine. So I have to wonder if somebody at the Creation Museum isn’t one of his converts, and thus wanted to tell the story of a man that many of the visitors to the museum will have forgotten.

Here are some other Charles Templeton links on my site:

• Home Page
• Jesus, a bible in modern English
• Anecdotal Memoir

Right now I’m in the process of scanning some of his books and will post when I have done this.

I’m scanning my documents on an ADF document scanner now, and it’s largely pretty impressive, but I’m surprised at some things the system won’t do.

Double page feeding is the bane of document scanning. To prevent it, many scanners offer methods of double feed detection, including ultrasonic detection of double thickness and detection when one page is suddenly longer than all the others (because it’s really two.)

There are a number of other tricks they could do, I think. I think a paper feeder that used air suction or gecko-foot van-der-waals force pluckers on both sides of a page to try to pull the sides in two different directions could help not just detect, but eliminate such feeds.

However, the most the double feed detectors do is signal an exception to stop the scan. Which means work re-feeding and a need to stand by.

However, many documents have page numbers. And we’re going to OCR them and the OCR engine is pretty good at detecting page numbers (mostly out of desire to remove them.) However, it seems to me a good approach would be to look for gaps in the page numbers, especially combined with the other results of a double feed. Then don’t stop the scan, just keep going, and report to the operator which pages need to be scanned again. Those would be scanned, their number extracted, and they would be inserted in the right place in the final document.

Of course, it’s not perfect. Sometimes page numbers are not put on blank pages, and some documents number only within chapters. So you might not catch everything, but you could catch a lot of stuff. Operators could quickly discern the page numbering scheme (though I think the OCR could do this too) to guide the effort.

I’m seeking a maximum convenience workflow. I think to do that the best plan is to have several scanners going, and the OCR after the fact in the background. That way there’s always something for the operator to do — fixing bad feeds, loading new documents, naming them — for maximum throughput. Though I also would hope the OCR software could do better at naming the documents for you, or at least suggesting names. Perhaps it can, the manual for Omnipage is pretty sparse.

While some higher end scanners do have the scanner figure out the size of the page (at least the length) I am not sure why it isn’t a trivial feature for all ADF scanners to do this. My $100 Strobe sheetfed scanner does it. That my $6,000 (retail) FI-5650 needs extra software seems odd to me.

PCs can go into standby mode (just enough power to preserve the RAM and do wake-on-lan) and into hibernate mode (where they write out the RAM to disk, shut down entirely and restore from disk later) as well as fully shut down.

Standby mode comes back up very fast, and should be routinely used on desktops. In fact, non-server PCs should consider doing it as a sort of screen saver since the restart can be so quick. It’s also popular on laptops but does drain the battery in a few days keeping the RAM alive. Many laptops will wake up briefly to hibernate if left in standby so long that the battery gets low, which is good.

How about this option: Write the ram contents out to disk, but also keep the ram alive. When the user wants to restart, they can restart instantly, unless something happened to the ram. If there was a power flicker or other trouble, notice the ram is bad and restart from disk. Usually you don’t care too much about the extra time needed to write out to disk when suspending, other than for psychological reasons where you want to be really sure the computer is off before leaving it. It’s when you come back to the computer that you want instant-on.

In fact, since RAM doesn’t actually fail all that quickly, you might even find you can restore from RAM after a brief power flicker. In that case, you would want to store a checksum for all blocks of RAM, and restore any from disk that don’t match the checksum.

To go further, one could also hibernate to newer generations of fast flash memory. Flash memory is getting quite cheap, and while older generations aren’t that quick, they seek instantaneously. This allows you to reboot a machine with its memory “paged out” to flash, and swap in pages at random as they are needed. This would allow a special sort of hybrid restore:

1. Predict in advance which pages are highly used, and which are enough to get the most basic functions of the OS up. Write them out to a special contiguous block of hibernation disk. Then write out the rest, to disk and flash.
2. When turning on again, read this block of contiguous disk and go “live.” Any pages needed can then be paged in from the flash memory as needed, or if the flash wasn’t big enough, unlikely pages can come from disk.
3. In the background, restore the rest of the pages from the faster disk. Eventually you are fully back to ram.

This would allow users to get a fairly fast restore, even from full-off hibernation. If they click on a rarely used program that was in ram, it might be slow as stuff pages in, but still not as bad as waiting for the whole restore.

I’ve been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in “Data Portability” which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word “portability” for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.

But it’s also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call “data hosting.” It’s a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top.

A data hosting approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. (You might have that server right in your own house, or pay for hosting services.) If you pay, that server’s duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That’s what you’re paying for. You can have more than one (with different personas, if you like) but for now let’s imagine having just one.

Your data host’s job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

As such, you don’t join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications which can run on your data. They don’t get the data, rather they write code to do things with it that runs in a protected sandbox on your data host.  read more »

Been getting a bunch of calls from reporters this weekend. Our good friend spam turns 30 in a couple of days, and a few years ago I did some research and became an authority on the history of the term and the phenomenon. Since everybody else is doing it, I though I should point to my various articles on the history of spam, as well as some updates I just wrote for the 30th.

• How the word “spam” came to mean Junk E-mail.
• The first spam, from May 1978 and the reaction to it. Look in particular for Richard Stallman’s defence of spam.
• Reflections back on the 25th anniversary along with new thoughts on the 30th.
• My collection of spam essays including my best plans to defeat spam.

If you’ve seen all this before, you can mostly focus on the new thoughts where I talk about the rise of Botnets — which may negate many of the best anti-spam solutions, and the flight to Facebook from e-mail by the younger generation.

Update: I’ve done a bunch of press interviews on spam this week, and was on May 3’s “Weekend All Things Considered” on NPR as well. I get in quite a few words, especially for radio.

Spam Filters and the degradation of e-Mail.

And now this new thought. Spam filters are working better, but content filtering means false positives. Curiously, this has brought an unreliability to e-mail which parallels the famous (but mostly false) unreliability of the postal service.

In the old days, the widespread belief in the poor quality of the postal service was a popular excuse. You could always tell somebody you hadn’t received his letter, or that it had been very slow in arriving, or that you had sent your letter but it must have gotten lost or delayed. And people would either believe it, or feel they had to pretend to believe it. We dubbed the system “snail mail” to reiterate this, and of course “The Cheque is in the Mail” became known as one of the 3 great lies.

For a while e-mail was good enough that you couldn’t use this lie so easily. And it was too fast, as well. The only question was when you would get around to reading your mail.

But now we’ve got a new excuse — your mail got trashed by my spam filters. Oh, wait, I found it, in my spam folder. A nice and convenient lie that the other party can’t quite call you out on. Likewise, now, when I send a mail and don’t hear back, I always have to wonder if the mail has been caught in the filters.

(More often than not, non-response is due to another e-mail phenomenon: the growing stack. If I can’t answer your mail right away there is a danger it will move down the stack in my e-mail box, and soon be lost to attention, even though it’s there and I read it.)

I’ve spoken about the Web 2.0 movement that is now calling itself “data portability.” Now there are web sites, and format specifications and plans are underway to make it possible to quickly export the personal data you put on one social networking site to another. While that sounds like a good thing — we like interoperability, and cooperation, and low barriers to entry on new players — I sometimes seem like a lone voice warning about some of the negative consequences of this.

I know I’m not going to actually stop the data portability movement, and nor is that really my goal. But I do have a challenge for it: Switch to a slightly negative name. Data portability sounds like motherhood, and this is definitely not a motherhood issue. Deliberately choosing a name that includes the negative connotations would make people stop and think as they implement such systems. It would remind them, every step of the way, to consider the privacy implications. It would cause people asking about the systems to query what they have done about the downsides.

And that’s good, because otherwise it’s easy to put on a pure engineering mindset and say, “what’s the easiest way we can build the tools to make this happen?” rather than “what’s a slightly harder way that mitigates some of the downsides?”

A name I dreamed up is BEPSI, standing for Bulk Export of Personal and Sensitive Information. This is just as descriptive, but reminds you that you’re playing with information that has consequences. Other possible names include EBEPSI (Easy Bulk Export…) or OBEPSI (One-click Bulk Export…) which sounds even scarier.

It’s rare for people to do something so balanced, though. Nobody likes to be reminded there could be problems with what they’re doing. They want a name that sounds happy and good, so they can feel happy and good. And I know the creator of dataportability.org thinks he’s got a perfectly good name already so there will be opposition. But a name like this, or another similar one, would be the right thing to do. Remind people of the paradoxes with every step they take.

Ok, this would be a cool application for iPhones, Pocket PC and the like — a dialer which presents an old style rotary phone dial, and you have to put your finger in it and spin it around the center, and then it slowly twists back and plays the sound of a dial returning. A bit like how you control an iPod, but slower.

Completely useless, other than for having fun and explaining to kids why we call it “dialing” a phone.

Perhaps with the iPhone accelerometer you could actually spin the physical iPhone to move the dial. No way to generate the classic sore index finger and physical resistance though.

(Some people made jokes about rotary dial on the iPhone before it was launched but I don’t know of anybody who actually did this.)

With sadness I must report the passing of William C. Tate, my stepfather, on Thursday. Bill and my mother met and fell in love when I was a young teenager. He was a neighbour, and I had met him, and even stayed over at his house with his son before they would meet, which is a bit unusual. He was kind and generous and supported her and our family for many decades. While he died from cancer, it came upon him quite suddenly and he was fortunately strong until near the end.

Bill was a leader in Toronto’s business community. He started out in the finance dept. of the small Canadian office of Garret Corporation, a major aerospace manufacturer. Quickly he was put in charge, and built it up to a 1,400 person operation making a variety of important components for civil and military aircraft.

I have created a site with a slight longer obituary and a link to a comment/guestbook thread on this blog. Visit the Bill Tate memorial at wctate.com or the guestbook page.

Ok, admit it, who likes blogging in to a vacuum. You want to know how many people are actually reading your blog.

I have created a simple Perl script that scans your blog’s log file and attempts to calculate how many people read the blog and the RSS feeds.

You can download the feed reader script. I release it under GPL2.

It’s a perl script, so you would go to your web server log in the shell, and type “perl feedreaders.pl logfilename” or if you like just “tail -99999 blogfilename | perl feedreaders.pl -” because you only need to scan a couple of days worth of logs to get the figures.

Here are some notes:

• I take advantage of the fact that most blog aggregators now report how many people they are aggregating for. There is no standard but I have put in code to match the common patterns.
• I identify common RSS feed URLs, as well as the most common “main feed” names. If you have other feeds that it doesn’t pick up on, it’s easy to add them to the list at the start of the program.
• A reader has to fetch the feed or home page multiple times from the same IP to count
• On the other hand, people who change IPs regularly will count multiple times. People behind caches may count just once all together.
• I try to eliminate fetches from the most common non-RSS-aggregating spiders
• Based on my experiences, Google Reader and Bloglines are the most popular aggregators, then NewsGator.
• At least one aggregator identifies as Mozilla, custom code tags it.
• It also counts people who fetch your non-RSS blog page multiple times as readers.
• Programs that don’t say they handle multiple users get grouped among the singles.
• Programs with only a few fetches are not counted

I invite my 1146 main blog readers to give it a whirl. (The 53 readers of the new Battlestar blog feed won’t see this notice, nor the 72 reading the comments.

Recently, while keynoting the Freedom 2 Connect conference in Washington, I spoke about some of my ideas for fiber networks being built from the ground up. For example, I hope for the day when cheap kits can be bought at local stores to fiber up your block by running fiber through the back yards, in some cases literally burying the fiber in the “grass roots.”

Doc Searls, while he was listening to the talk made up a clever term — “Glass Roots” to describe this, and other movements to deploy fiber bottom up, without waiting for telcos and city governments. Any time you can deploy a technology without permission and red tape, it quickly zooms ahead of other technology. Backyard fiber, — combined with cheaper, mass produced free-space-optics or gigabit EHF radio equipment to bridge blocks together across streets or make links to hilltops — could provide the bandwidth we want without waiting.

Because let’s face it. While wireless ISPs sound great and are indeed great for serving some types of customers, right now real bandwidth requires a wire or glass fiber in the ground, and that means monopoly telcos and cable companies as well as the hassles of city government. We want our gigabits (forget megabits) and we want them now.

There are other elements to this Glass Roots movement, though usually with city involvement. Several small towns have put in fiber based ISPs with good success. My friend Brewster Kahle, from the Internet Archive, has brought 100 megabit service to housing projects in San Francisco using some city-laid fiber and the Archive’s bandwidth. You go, Brewster.

Brough Turner has the right idea. We should get dark fiber under our streets, and lots of it, installed and leased by a company that is only in the fiber business, and not in the business of selling you video or phone service or internet. While this company might get a franchise, the important difference is that the franchised monopoly would not light the fiber. Instead, anybody could lease a fiber from their house to a major switching point, and light it any way they want. Darth Vader would tell us “you don’t understand the power of the dark fiber.”

Why is that important? While fiber and wire are basic, the technologies to “light them up” run on Moore’s law. They get obsolete very quickly. Instead of monopoly rents and long cost-plus amortization tables, you want lots of turnover in the actual electronics found at the ends. You want the option to get the latest stuff, which is usually faster and cheaper than the stuff from 2 years ago. Lots faster and lots cheaper.

If you get a lot of free market competition on what lights those endpoints, it gets even better. The result is plenty of choice in how you light it and who you get connectivity from. And that eliminates all the issues around network neutrality or walled gardens. The investment in the dark fiber can probably be amortized over a decade or two, which is long enough.

One might argue the monopoly should even just be at the level of a conduit which it’s easy to drag other things like fiber or wire through. And indeed, whoever does bury pipes under the streets should expect to pull other wires before too long. But having monopoly lockdown at any level above the glass is what slows down the advance of broadband. Get rid of that lockdown, and the real glass roots revolution can begin.

It was good to see a major newsmagazine like Time do its cover story on the corn ethanol scam this week. I’ve been worried about corn as a source of biofuel for some time. So far, it makes no sense, and is only used because of the power of the corn lobby and senators from agricultural states. I’ve read various arguments (all with political agendas) about just how much petrofuel is burned in order to make corn based ethanol. Some figures calculate it takes more petrofuel than you get ethanol out — in other words, by putting ethanol in your car, as we all do 10% during the summer in California, you’re actually burning more fossil fuel than you would otherwise. E85 (85% ethanol) is even worse. Other figures, supported by the corn ethanol lobby, say it is not nearly that bad, but even with their best numbers they can only make it a modestly positive gain.

It’s hard to work out who to believe, but the most telling fact I learned was this: None of the corn-ethanol producers run their whole system — tractors, trucks and ethanol conversion plants — on their own product. Since they should be able to get their own product at a discount, this makes no sense.

Adding to the confusion is that a gallon is not a gallon. In particular, a gallon of ethanol has only 70% of the energy of gasoline, so you’ll only get 70% of the mileage. (Diesel has 12% more energy per gallon than gasoline, which is the real reason why diesel cars get better mileage. They aren’t really much better per kg of carbon burnt.)

The only ethanol source that’s provably positive is sugar cane. More on that later. There are a lot of worthwhile efforts to develop ethanol from cellulose (like switchgrass) or algae, and they could make a real difference. The corn lobby is not that excited about those.

In spite of this, we watch ads describing E85 cars as green, when they are anti-green. People see E85 priced 19% cheaper than gasoline (national average) and think it’s some bargain. It isn’t.

Corn for ethanol is driving up the price of corn. That make more land get converted to corn. In turn, Time found, that was making shifts in land use in Brazil, and the result was that more land in the rainforest is being cleared (often by burning) than ever before. But now there’s a horrible irony — all this is happening because people imagine they are doing something green by using corn based ethanol. (Brazil uses sugarcane for its own ethanol production.)

Now on to sugar. In the USA, sugar costs more than twice as much as the rest of the world. That’s why Coke from Mexico has real sugar, because sugar is cheap there. In the USA it has — surprise, surprise — high fructose corn syrup.

Sugar is expensive in the USA because there are import taxes and quotas that benefit a fairly small number of families who are really sugar agribusinesses. Those families love their little monopoly on sugar production of course, and fight to defend the laws that provide it. But the corn lobby joins in to help of course, to sell more high fructose corn syrup. (Though now HFCS has dropped in price to be closer to the world sugar price so we would not entirely get rid of it.)

We need to:

• Immediately remove laws that require the addition of ethanol to gasoline. Find something besides MTBE or ethanol if need be.
• Clearly label corn based ethanol and E85 as lower mileage and non-green, punishing those who advertise it as green. Or make them run their machines on their own ethanol and publish the numbers.
• Put more into research of truly net-positive biofuels that don’t use existing crop-lands or involve clearing of forested land, and use them only if we can show they are net-green.
• Abandon sugar quota and sugar tarrifs
• Consider growing more sugar cane if we want biofuels, but again, factor in the cost of the crops displaced or land cleared.

Biofuels are a hard problem. Using recycled veggie oil is great, and we’ve run our Burning Man camp on that, but there is only so much of that out there. Even if we converted all our croplands to biofuels, we would only modestly dent our fuel consumption. This suggests that only solutions like algae or wild grasslands could work.

No, I don’t mean dissolve congress. Rather I propose a different way to run a legislature in the modern world.

There would be no capitol. Instead, all members would work in their districts, all the time. And we would put in a bunch of extra nice HDTV videoconferencing systems. The system would be designed to handle meetings, all the way up to a full session of the house or senate, with multiple screens to show amalgamated “crowd” as well as close-up views of the important figures — the person with the floor, the person next to get the floor, the last person to have the floor, the Speaker, the party leaders etc. Members would attend sessions that way, and through a secured channel, vote. There would be screens for semi-private discussions with others during the meeting. Of course all this video would be available to the public, too.

Members, and their staffs, could also videoconference in HD with other members and their staffs, as well as any other government officials they need to talk to. And quite possibly, with a few exceptions such as classified committee meetings, all that video would be available to the public too. For those without the equipment, the old capitol would come equipped with meeting rooms that use the system. “Going up to the hill” would mean going to use one of the rooms.

Members could meet in person of course, but they would need to have a chaperone to assure they don’t make secret deals. Classified meetings would get a properly cleared chaperone.

And they could meet with lobbyists over the videoconferencing system too. And those meetings would certainly be available to the public. Registered obbyists need not and could not come to meet in person.

Of course, the members would get out of touch with beltway thinking. They would lose the serendipity of meeting the right person on the hill, the business done at exclusive beltway cocktail parties. But in exchange they and their staff would live and breathe, quite literally, their district. I can see arguments good and bad about the trade-off but it is not clear that either one is inherently superior. It would hurt the DC economy a bit, and airlines would lose some business.

Strictly speaking, all the transparency rules I describe above, where members can’t talk off the record or without chaperones, is not inherent in the idea of a videoconferenced legislature. One could do that and still allow all sorts of unrecorded conversations. They would figure out ways to have them anyway. What the video system does is enables an easy implementation of an all-transparent, all-recorded seat of government.

Food for thought, anyway.

In my growing research on transportation energy economics, I’ve come upon some rather astonishing research. I always enjoy debates on total cost analysis — trying to figure out the true energy cost of things, by adding in the energy spent elsewhere to make things happen. (For example, the energy to smelt the metals in your car adds quite a bit to its energy cost.)

Humans are modestly efficient. Walking,an average person burns about 100 Calories per mile at 3mph, or 300 per hour, while sitting for the same hour burns around 80 Calories just keeping you warm. In other words, the walking 3 miles uses about 220 extra Calories. Calories are kilocalories, and one Calorie/kcal is about 4 BTUs, 4200 joules or 1.63 watt-hours.

While walking 1 mile burns an extra 74 Calories, on a bicycle we’re much better. Biking one mile at 10mph takes about 38 extra calories over sitting.

A gallon of gas has about 31,000 calories in it, so you might imagine that you get 815 mpg biking and 400mpg walking. Pretty good. (Unless you compare it to an electric scooter, which turns out to get the equivalent of 1500 mpg.)

But there’s a problem. We eat, on average about 2700 Calories/day in the USA, almost all of it produced by agribusiness. Which runs on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels provide the fertilizer. They run the machines. The process and transport and refrigerate the food. In many cases our food (cows) eats food produced with such high energy cost to feed us.

I’ve been digging around estimates, and have found that U.S. agriculture burns about 400 gasoline-gallon equivalents per American. Or 1.1 gallons per day, or about 10 Calories from fuel for every Calorie of food. For beef, it’s far worse, as close to 40 Calories of fuel are used to produce one Calorie of beefy goodness.

You can see where this is going. I’m not the first to figure it out, but it’s worth repeating. Your 3 mile walk burned 220 extra Calories over sitting, but drove the use of 2,200 Calories of fossil fuel. That’s 1/14th of a gallon of gasoline (9oz.) So you’re getting about 42 miles per gallon of fossil fuel.

If you eat a lot of beef or other livestock, and want to consider your incremental food as having come from beef, it’s around 10 miles per gallon.

So yes, if you drive your Prius instead of walking it’s going to burn less fossil fuel. If 2 people drive in a more ordinary car it’s going to burn less fossil fuel than both of them walking.

Biking’s better. The average-diet cyclist is getting 85 miles per gallon of fossil fuel. Still better for 2 to share a Prius. The beefeater is, as before only 1/4 as good. At 21mpg he’s better than a Hummer, but not that much better.

This is a fuel to fuel comparison. The fuel burned in the cars is the same fuel burned in the tractors. It has extra energy costs in its extraction and transport, but this applies equally to both cases. And yes, of course, the exercise has other benefits than getting from A to B. And we have not considered a number of the other external costs of the vehicle travel — but they still don’t make this revelation less remarkable. (And neither does this result suggest one should not still walk or bike, rather it suggests we should make our food more efficiently.)

And no, taking transit isn’t going to help. Transit systems, on average, are only mildly greener than cars. City buses, in fact, use the same energy per passenger mile as typical cars. Light rail is sometimes 2 and rarely even 3 times better than cars, but in some cities like San Jose, it uses almost twice as much energy per actual passenger than passenger cars do.

Happy eating!

Pundits like to point out when some new media technology changes seriously changed politics. When I was young, everybody talked about how the Kennedy-Nixon debates ushered in the era of the TV candidate and changed politics forever. (It did indeed seem unlikely a candidate in a wheelchair from polio could win today, but in fact in Bob Dole and John McCain we have two candidates without full use of their arms.)

No doubt when radio came into play there was similar commentary.

But now it’s more rapid. So I’ll make a prediction. Form now on, the pace of change in media and the other technologies of politics will be so rapid that every election will be different in some important way from those before it, due to technology. Some of the changes will be overhyped, some will be underhyped, but there may never again be “politics as usual” — meaning politics as they were 4 years ago.

This will be both good and bad. Most interesting to me is the cost of media. In the USA, most political corruption and influence comes because all politicians feel they must raise a huge amount of money, so much that they spend more time doing that than actually doing their jobs, and they will even admit this. They feel they need to raise this money to make media buys, in particular TV ads. So anything that breaks this equation, such as formalized political spam may have the potential for great good. As for the rest of the changes yet to come, it’s hard to say how we’ll feel about them.

Quite some time ago, I challeged readers to come up with a better word than The Singularity to describe the phenomenon, famously named and described by Vernor Vinge, of a technological gulf so wide that it is impossible to understand and predict beyond it.

The word is not good because when people with math training hear it, those who already know the normal meaning of the word, it makes no sense. Vinge’s singularity is not a point discontinuity or an asymptote going to infinity. It is not necessarily even a single inflection point. For those who don’t know the regular meaning of the word, the name conveys nothing. It was a metaphor.

Ray Kurzweil, against my advice, gave the term a big boost in The Singularity is Near, a book which I should disclose had major contributions by my S.O. And so people are now more wedded to the term than before.

I propose a different term: The Takeoff.

While this term has a few meanings, both literal and metaphorical, that are well known to most people, they will not confuse the literal meaning, and the metaphorical meaning is actually close to what we’re trying to express. A departure from the ground into a whole new realm, with a sudden acceleration.

In fact, I suggest this term because it is already in use. Students of the area regularly refer to two types of singularity they call a “hard takeoff” and a “soft takeoff.” Switching to this term would simply strengthen these terms.

And yes, there is a negative meaning of the term (similar to rip-off) but I don’t think that will be a major concern.

Other terms suggested have not grabbed my attention. Some suggestions, like “the spike” are just plain wrong — it is most certainly not a spike (whihc goes up and comes back down sharply,) except in dystopian visions.

While it’s stupid that the biggest story to come out of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive was the gossip over the interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy, the one “hook” that has kept the story going is the suggestion that it was the use of twitter, in particular snide comments on twitter, which turned the audience against Lacy, the interviewer from Business Week.

There have even been comments (from those who weren’t even there) suggesting witch hunts and misogyny. Other bloggers used hyperbolic terms like “train-wreck” and “career-ending” which are serious exaggerations.

Short summary. In a “keynote” interview, Lacy, who has just finished a book about Facebook, was on stage to interview Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was, as usual, a difficult interview subject, but for a variety of reasons the character of the interview changed as the audience turned against Lacy, cheering criticism of her. Most agreed they had not seen somebody lose an audience like this in some time.  read more »

Earlier I wrote an essay on the paradox of identity management describing some counter-intuitive perils that arise from modern efforts at federated identity. Now it’s time to expand these ideas to efforts for portable personal data, especially portable social networks.

Partly as a reaction to Facebook’s popular applications platform, other social networking players are seeking a way to work together to stop Facebook from taking the entire pie. The Google-lead open social effort is the leading contender, but there are a variety of related technologies, including OpenID, hcard and other microformats. The primary goal is to make it easy, as users move from one system to another, or run sub-abblications on one platform, to make it easy to provide all sorts of data, including the map of their social network, to the other systems.

Some are also working on a better version of this goal, which is to allow platforms to interoperate. As I wrote a year ago interoperation seems the right long term goal, but a giant privacy challenge emerges. We may not get very many chances to get this right. We may only get one.

The paradox I identified goes against how most developers think. When it comes to greasing the skids of data flow, “features” such as portability, ease of use and user control, may not be entirely positive, and may in fact be on the whole negative. The easier it is for data to flow around, the more it will flow around, and the more that sites will ask, and then demand that it flow. There is a big difference between portability between applications — such as OpenOffice and MS Word reading and writing the same files — and portability between sites. Many are very worried about the risks of our handing so much personal data to single 3rd party sites like Facebook. And then Facebook made it super easy — in fact mandatory with the “install” of any application — to hand over all that data to hundreds of thousands of independent application developers. Now work is underway to make it super easy to hand over this data to every site that dares to ask or demand it.  read more »

Fancier conferences put up two projectors to let the audience see the slides. But the presenters still look at their slides on a notebook on the podium, or in some cases on a monitor on the floor below their stage.

How about adding a projector that projects on the back wall, just above the heads of the audience, for the speaker to see their own slides? Then they can roam the stage and see the slides without losing eye contact with the audience. They may not be able to see clear detail on the slides but they shouldn't need it.

It's true this does not work as well for "Presenter mode" which shows the speaker a different display on the notebook from what is seen on the projector, both because most notebooks don't have two video outputs, and also because you don't want to give the audience access to your notes and the title of the next slide as is often shown in presenter mode. However, not too many use this and it's not usually the end of the world if somebody can look back and see the notes.

You also want to show the speaker a clock. If that can be overlaid on the rear screen, great, but this can also be done as a different screen with a big clock. Projectors and screens are small enough to make this workable at fancy conferences.

Today I am at eComm, a reborn conference. Tim O’Reilly, who does the eTech conference (which just took place last week) used to run an emerging telecom conference called eTel. They decided not to run it again, so some of the participants who wanted a little more edgy telecom conference pushed to start a different one. I had hoped it would be an ad-hoc conference in the barcamp/unconference style, but instead it’s become a more traditional $1K conference like eTel was.

However, the result seems to be a success. Very good list of speakers (though some are just doing sales pitches as their talks) and a decent sized crowd. And even a few people who were also just at SXSW (as I was.) Some are calling the chain of conferences — eTech, SXSW, eComm, VON and many others as “March Madness.” It does seem possible to spend the month of March, if not your whole life, at conferences.

We’ll see what interesting develops here. Thom Howe spoke to try to convince carriers to become commodity providers, using the example of corn to say that it can be lucrative. He’s right that they need to become commodities but wrong that they can be convinced to want it.

(And corn turns out to be a terrible example. Corn is everywhere because of abuse of the law and corruption in government, in combination with sugar quota.)

Earlier on, I identified robot delivery vehicles as one of the steps on the roadmap to robot cars. In fact, these are officially what the DARPA grand challenges really seek, since the military wants robots that can move things through danger zones without putting soldiers at risk.

Deliverbots may well be allowed on the road before fully automated robotaxis for humans because there are fewer safety issues. Deliverbots can go more slowly, as most cargo is not super-urgent. If they go slower, and have a low weight limit, it may be the case that they can’t cause much harm if they go astray. Obviously if a deliverbot crashes into an inanimate object, it just cost money and doesn’t injure people. The deliverbot might be programmed to be extra-cautious and slow around anything like a person. As such, it might be allowed on the road sooner.

I gave a talk on Robot cars at the BIL conference, and an attendee came up to suggest the deliverbots enable a new type of equipment rental. Because they can bring you rental equipment quickly, cheaply and with no hassle, they make renting vastly more efficient and convenient. People will end up renting things they would never consider renting today. Nowadays you only rent things you really need which are too expensive or bulky to own.

By the way, the new NPR morning show the “Bryant Park Project” decided to interview a pair of speakers, one from TED and one from BIL, so I talked about my robot cars talk. You can listen to the segment or follow links to hear the whole show.

It was suggested even something as simple as a vacuum cleaner could become a rental item. Instead of buying a $200 vacuum to clean your floors once a week, you might well rent a super-high quality $2,000 unit which comes to you with short notice via deliverbot. This would also be how you might treat all sorts of specialized, bulky or expensive tools. Few will keep their own lathe, band saw or laser engraver, but if you can get one in 10 minutes, you would never need to.

(Here in silicon valley, an outfit called Tech Shop offers a shop filled with all the tools and toys builders like, for a membership fee and materials cost. It’s great for those who are close to it or want to trek there, but this could be better. This in turn would also let us make better use of the space in our homes, not storing things we don’t really need to have.